Some bands look great on paper, even before you’ve heard a note. That certainly applies to alt rock/melodic punkers UltraBomb. Featuring musicians associated with Minneapolis scene legends Soul Asylum and Hüsker Dü along with a member of Social Distortion, Ultrabomb is a legacy act in every sense.
It seems unbelievable that we’ve reached December already. It was only Easter a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, the end of the year is fast approaching and, as is traditional, we’ll be counting down the days to Xmas with the Real Gone advent calendar!
For the UK audience, Soul Asylum will be best remembered for an all too brief moment in the early to mid 90s when the band gained regular exposure on MTV. Their 1992 album ‘Grave Dancer’s Union’ gave them a belated smash hit, and with a lot of years’ distance it’s still very easy to understand why. The record’s noisier fare connected with an alternative crowd looking for something more melodic than the grunge that dominated the rock scene at the time, and the more tuneful numbers harked back to peak Tom Petty crossed with something that sounded like the Lemonheads in bigger musical boots. Although by accident rather than design, this would be an album that connected with a huge cross section of rock fans around the world.
With debut albums from Crowded House and The Housemartins standing alongside massive hits from Madonna, a-ha and Red Box, 1986 would already have a strong enough grounding to challenge 1984 as one of the decade’s finest years for music. With Huey Lewis’s ‘Fore!’ challenging 1983’s as his masterpiece, a strong AOR debut from Robert Tepper and Jackson Browne’s ‘Lives In The Balance’ channelling a very commercial sound, it was also very much a year for great Transatlantic AOR and sounds that now seem so entrenched within that decade, you can’t help but love them.
We don’t know about you, but here at Real Gone Towers there’s a feeling that this year has disappeared far, far too quickly.
It’s December already and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for our countdown to xmas!
For the next three (and a bit) weeks, we’ll be bringing you a selection of hopefully entertaining clips in the build up to the big event. A new clip will be added each day, so don’t forget to keep checking back!